Richard Hazler

Richard Hazler

JoLynn Carney and Richard Hazler will present "Bullies and Bystanders: How to Prevent Harassment and Violence in Schools" at Penn State's first Research Unplugged event of the fall semester on Oct. 10 at 12:30 p.m. in Schlow Centre Region Library, downtown State College. Faculty members and frequent collaborators in the College of Education's counselor education program, Carney is associate professor and Hazler, professor and program coordinator.

In the wake of every school shooting, the nation struggles to make sense of senselessness, asking how and why such tragic violence could occur in places tasked with nurturing and protecting our children. Is it possible to reduce the risk of deadly violence in our schools?

JoLynn Carney and Richard Hazler, faculty members in Penn State's Counselor Education program, were named winners of the American Counseling Association (ACA) Research Award. They will receive their award at the ACA National Conference March 24. Their study was titled "The Relations Between Bullying Exposures in Middle Childhood, Anxiety, and Adrenocortical Activity," published in April 2010 in the Journal of School Violence.

Penn State College of Education professors JoLynn Carney, associate professor of counselor education, and Richard Hazler, professor of counselor education, studied the effects of bullying on bystanders. "Bullying can also cause people who witness it to demonstrate physical stress symptoms of increased heart rate and perspiration as well as high levels of self-reported trauma even years after bullying events," Carney said. According to Carney and Hazler, the general theme emerging from their research is that bullying doesn't just affect victims.

Two counseling professors from Penn State supported families who experienced the June 2011 Minot, N.D. flood disaster.

Licensed professional clinical counselors -- JoLynn Carney, an associate professor of counselor education at Penn State, and Richard Hazler, the professor-in-charge of counselor education at Penn State, both in the College of Education -- were called upon by the American Red Cross to help provide crisis counseling to some of the 10,000-plus displaced victims of the flood that ravaged the town of Minot, N.D. in June 2011.

Once characterized as a normal, character-building rite of passage for school children, school bullying is under renewed scrutiny by today's researchers and educators. In the seven years since the tragedy at Columbine High School, there have been more than twenty school shootings in the United States that resulted in death or serious injury. Does school bullying play a role in these tragedies?

In the summer of 1976, my days centered on avoiding Bernadette. We were
both eleven and lived in the same working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, but that's where the resemblance ended. With closely cropped red hair and a compact muscular body, Bernadette rolled her shirtsleeves up like James Dean and wore a permanent sneer on her round freckled face. I was her opposite number, a romantic bookworm with brown braids who wandered around in a near-constant daydream.